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Not my momma's cookin' |
In spite of my years of body image issues and trying to diet myself to skinny, I never actually started to eat wholesome food until college, where the dining hall had lots of healthy stuff and I could force myself to like raw vegetables one leaf of spinach at a time. Eventually I became vegetarian to cut carbon emissions to my name, further distancing myself from my "home" diet. Eating differently, though, is different from cooking differently. As I weened myself off a meal plan I mostly had rice and beans or frozen vegetables, which is very balanced but not particularly adventurous. But hey, I didn't go to the Ivy League to become a chef.
At home, especially this last summer, I tried to take advantage of my parents' well-stocked kitchen to approach cooking the way I suppose any person my age who feels they don't know how to cook would: by trying recipes off the internet. My parents were just shocked that someone would ask them to eat so much green without any meat.
Flash forward to now, where I live on a beautiful tropical island, of which a solid percent is covered in fields. Surely I can find some way to be healthy here while enjoying the local cuisine, right? Problem: it's an island, and I'm allergic to fish and seafood. Most of the cuisine has fish and seafood in it. That which doesn't, including a great lentil stew that a friend of my supervisor let me try, has meat in it. The rest is mostly dessert an alcohol, based on restaurant menus, internet searches, cookbooks in gift shops, and conversations I've had with my supervisor. Except maybe soup.
I consider a plant-based diet to be more of my ideal, anywho, so why not just buy fresh veggies and chomp down? Since the bus freaking never comes, I can walk to a grocery store of some size in about 45 minutes, but they take a very laissez-faire approach to stocking: they have what they have, and when they don't have something, its bin is empty - can you imagine the riot that would happen if your local Wal-Mart was out of onions? Next, I sauntered over to a street market, where all the vendors have the same things for sale because the same plants get ripe in everybody's garden at the same time. Plus, I paid 6 euros for two avocados.
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I strive to be as attractive as humanly possible at all times. |
supplemental vegetables based on a non-local recipe I found on the internet. Too bad I couldn't smell the lentils burning to the bottom of the pan and didn't realize the rock-hard surface my spoon was scraping as I stirred was not the bottom of the pan but a layer of blackened lentils. That added an interesting flavor.
Basically, I'm back to dried grain and beans and frozen vegetables, the most notable exception being that I'm eating entire avocados until they go out of season in a month or so.

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